This is an occasional blog about IET's use of CA Gen for internal development as well as thoughts, tips and techniques on using CA Gen for application development. It is aimed at the CA Gen development professional, so please excuse the jargon and assumed level of knowledge about CA Gen. Reference will also be made to our products to put the development into context, so if you are not familiar with these, please visit the IET web site by clicking on the company logo.

Wednesday, 9 April 2014

Platform Independence

A key advantage of CA Gen is the platform
independent nature of the models coupled with code generation for platform
specific native code that offers high performance and access to native
operating system features and functions.

The abstraction provided by the CA Gen
model allows the developer to concentrate on the business requirements without
having to be excessively concerned with the details of the underlying technical
implementation.

Platform independence means that an
application be deployed to multiple target environments from the same model,
but also that the model is not tied to a specific combination of operating
system, language, compiler, database or framework versions. This means that the
underlying third party software stack can be updated without requiring changes
to the Gen models.

With Rapide and Gen, the developer is
shielded from the often considerable effort required to keep the underlying
software stack up to date and consistent. As examples of this, the changes made
in the Apple iOS APIs between version 6 and 7 or the complexity of keeping Java
frameworks up to date have typically
resulted in a considerable amount of effort for projects that code
directly using the native frameworks. With Rapide the upgrade to iOS7 was
implemented by simply installing a new version of the Rapide runtimes with no
change to the models or generated code.

Rapide extends CA Gen’s capabilities for
platform independence by providing support for multiple platforms (Browser,
Mobile and Desktop). A Rapide application comprises platform independent generated
Java code and a Java based cross-platform runtime that ensures consistent
behaviour and single-sourcing for all supported platforms.

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Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed here represent the personal opinions of the authors and not organizations that they are related to with unless stated explicitly. Tips and techniques described may be 'work in progress' and you should take your own measures to validate that any techniques used are valid and applicable for your own requirements. This blog is not responsible for any comments left apart from our own and off-topic comments may be deleted.